Your Right to Choose Your WAN Connectivity and Your Right to Security

When undergoing a WAN transition, one of the first steps involves ensuring flexible security for the WAN transformation. When you have to re-architect your network to an SDWAN architecture, it is important to have consistent security across branches, clouds and users. One of the best ways to move forward is to have a security solution that is suited to one’s SDWAN infrastructure. In choosing the right organization to help you with your security needs, you should choose a brand that is a leader in SDWAN and network security.

An organization that would be able to help you exercise your right to WAN connectivity and the right to security should be able to integrate a full security stack and a highly secure SDWAN fabric with the utmost level of flexibility, from the branch to the cloud-edge. Below we highlight how having a secure SDWAN infrastructure helps to improve certain factors:

• Efficacy of security: Having a secure SDWAN infrastructure helps to simplify the threat prevention with the shortest time to the detection of threats.
• Agility of the Network: It can take quite a lot of effort to add locations, apps and devices to the WAN. However, with a secure SDWAN architecture in place, it is possible to reduce the amount of time and effort taken due to the network agility.
• User experience: It has become easier than ever to craft better user experiences by allowing users fast and reliable internet and multi-cloud access.
• Continuity of business prospects: SDWAN security improves the continuity of a business by providing intent-based networking to automate the app assurance and business insights for the respective businesses.

When expanding their businesses, many organizations underestimate the security risks that their network could be prone to. However, there are numerous security risks that need to be considered in order to protect the branch users, connected devices and application usage at all of the direct internet access breakouts and all traffic across the WAN infrastructure. There are three types of risks that need to be considered. These include the inside-out risks, internal risks and the outside-in risks.

The types of inside-out risks include:

• Malware infections
• Command and control
• Phishing attacks
• Unacceptable use

The types of internal risks include:

• Unauthenticated access
• Lateral movement
• Compliance violations

The types of outside-in risks include:

• Unauthorized access
• Denial-of-service attacks

To ensure that the utmost security is provided to business organizations, SDWAN connection providers specialize in providing an open and integrated branch-to-cloud edge architecture. This involves a two-headed approach at the branch and in the cloud.

• At the branch: Routers which are thin, rich or full-stack embed the simple or flexible SDWAN and security functions to meet the IT service, security and compliance demands which are onsite.
• In the cloud: There is special emphasis to make sure that access and connectivity is secured over the public internet with threat protection over all the ports and there is performance assurance for the multi-cloud apps.

When you are choosing the right organization to help you with a secure SDWAN infrastructure, there are certain considerations that you should definitely enquire about, in order to get the best from them. There are certain security solutions that are a priority for enabling a proper SDWAN infrastructure. These include:

• Highly secure and flexible WAN connectivity: It is necessary that you have efficient authentication, strong encryption and micro segmentation delivered through certain trustworthy systems.
• End-to-end threat protection: Having end-to-end threat production will help you protect your users, data and applications from the WAN edge to the cloud.
• Unified access security: Based on the trustworthiness of the users and devices, one can get anytime, anywhere access to all of the applications.

It is possible to ensure the best customer experience and business continuity with the help of a network infrastructure that is secured for all types of security risks. One can also achieve better security efficacy and network agility during the process. Having a reliable and trustworthy network infrastructure will not only make the transfer of data easier, but also more effective. As a business organization, it is your right to ensure that you get the best WAN connection that is possible and also to make sure that you have the utmost security on the network infrastructure that is chosen.